Beyond the headlines are faces. Surely, they must have stories, too? And so one begins an imaginary search amid pulverized alleys to look for signs — a muffled sigh, a wail clinging to the broken walls, a dog’s bark — of life. How do did they live? No, not just what they eat or wear. What’s their idiom for quarreling? How do their children manipulate adults? What do they do to relax /forget become numb? Make love, play cards? Sing obscene songs?

There’s no pre or post in conflict zones. Memory is as unreliable as the now. There’s no sanity or insanity either, for the brain is an apocalyptic wasteland, where bizarre imagination composts smoky facts.

Reading from these zones then is similarly, if not equally, subversive as writing about these places. From a safe distance, this is a privileged curiosity and the reader is conscious of that.

What’s with the cooking, you ask? That’s because I have an incurable love of food and can’t have enough new things cooking in the kitchen.